As a child of the 80’s I played any arcade game I came in contact with. It didn’t matter what it was – if  I had a quarter in my pocket and the time to play it, my hands were steeled and ready to mash buttons to fight the onslaught of galaxy invaders, wild animals, cartoonish gremlins, or hulking brutes.  Sure, I had my favorites along the way, but generally speaking, I was indifferent to which glowing cabinet ate my money as long as it delivered a challenge.

Growing up and studying art and design has truly made me appreciate the visual aesthetics of things in this world. While I certainly enjoy playing arcade games, I have found through my collecting experiences that I actually enjoy the hobby more than the games themselves. What does that mean, you ask? Well, the hunt is certainly thrilling, but when it comes to placing games in my permanent collection or selling games to a buyer I enjoy the restoration process the most.

It all started when I raided an operator’s basement back in April, 2008. The basement was filled with classics (about 27 arcade games and 9 pinball machines). Some were real choice pieces and others had to be trashed due to water damage (Sorry Deathrace ) However, the real treasure came from the fact that the basement was the operator’s staging ground for his arcade back in the eighties. When he and his family moved to a new home, he was able to retain ownership of his old house (must’ve been nice to be an arcade op during the golden age…cha-ching!). That being said, it seems that he essentially left his basement untouched for about 18 years. Since this was his arcade’s storage area, repair shop, and conversion center, he still had nearly 15 new old stock (NOS) conversion kits that were never used.

I’ll spare you the details of what else was in that lot, but the important thing to know is that aside from all the other kits, I was now the proud owner of a new old stock GUNSMOKE conversion kit. The kit had everything included that you would need to deck out an existing cabinet – PCB, wiring, control panel overlay, marquee, joystick, control panel and instruction stickers, as well as the instruction manual. The only thing that was missing was the original side art, which I learned was applied to another Gunsmoke from back in the day that the op still has working on route and making money.

Based on the dimensions of the marquee, I determined that this conversion was most likely intended for a classic midway cabinet. It makes sense as there were plenty of pacman cabinets  to go around in those days that had stopped earning money and ops were happy to convert a pre-existing cabinet to turn into a money-maker.

I earmarked an old Pac-Man conversion from A different warehouse buyout from 2009. The game housed in the cabinet was Daytona Speedway and seems to be another game that was just a mod of the original Pac-Man pcb (like The Glob and others). The cabinet itself is very sturdy, and was covered in vinyl. The game still came with the original Pac bezel in great shape (if you didn’t count the years of dust on the top – WASH ME!!!)

Since the original game of Gunsmoke was a conversion, the kit simply provided operators a set of sideart stickers to cover up existing sideart of whatever cabinet they chose to place the game in. The factory sideart is ok, but I don’t really think it was anything special. See for yourself:

Therefore, since I’m making this “MY” gunsmoke, I can do whatever the hell I want to it. I would much prefer to have the old style of stenciled artwork on the side of the cabinet then some crap-ass sticker with inconsistent lettering, and a cheesy yellow cartoon sheriff smiling back at me. Therefore, if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself and I decided to design my own custom side art stencil.

I kept it down to one color to keep in cheaper, but I’m also a fan of “less is more” in terms of simplistic design. As you can see from the image, I also intend to paint the cabinet a dark brown in keeping with the rustic/western theme. I commissioned game stencils to take my Adobe Illustrator file and cut the vinyl stencils.

As many of us who have done restorations before know, most of the work is the boring, tedious, prep work needed to get the cabinet back to a decent state. The painting and adding highlights, that’s the fun stuff – the easy stuff. I present to you the non-fun stuff:

Sanded the cabinet down. It went to bare wood in a couple spots, but knowing I smoothed everything out and was putting primer on, I wasn’t too worried. Still, I probably spent a couple hours sanding and resanding with an orbital sander:

The cabinet had seen better days as evident from the many gouges and chips in the wood. Some damage was made worse by me as I went ahead and pulled off wood that was starting to pull off anyway so I could only work with the sturdy stuff.

I applied almost a whole can of bondo on this project. I made sure not to get too overzealous in my application and instead applied many small coats with sanding in between.

I didn’t take any pictures of the smoothly sanded bondo, but you don’t notice the imperfections like you would have before once you see it in it’s primed state. This is after two coats of KILZ primer:

Now the fun part – getting to see some results from your hard work. The cabinet has been sanded, filled, sanded, primed, and is now ready to even everything out by applying a nice layer of brown paint. One good thing about restoring a cabinet that doesn’t really have a “dedicated” cabinet is that I don’t have to be specific in paint colors or artwork. I didn’t have to get an exact color match, so instead I just grabbed a swatch of a chocolate brown from Home Depot. I chose a semigloss as I like the texture and shine. It may not be a color I would paint a room, but the cabinet turned out great:

As good as that looks and as fun as it was to finally see the cabinet cleaned up, the real fun came when I got to apply the long-awaited custom stencils.I had never applied a stencil to an arcade cabinet before, but it was pretty self-explanatory. Just to be safe, I made sure I followed the recommended application method from gamestencils.com.

The wind was not my friend that day, and without an extra set of hands, it was a little cumbersome to get everything perfect.Fortunately, my project doesn’t need to fit into a specified mold and can have as much “artistic freedom” as I want. Plus, with a wild-west theme, its ok if there are some imperfections and overspray. Here is the stencil being applied:

For the white paint, I just used a can of white protective rustoleum enamel. It left a little bit of texture that I wasn’t expecting, but really like now. I made sure to do several light coats instead of one or two heavy ones to make the paint even. This part went really fast since the cabinet surface was hot from the summer sun and the wind was blowing to help dry it off. I only truly messed up in one spot by accidentally removing a portion of the stencil without knowing it stuck to the backing, but I’m not telling where and if I didn’t mention it, I doubt your eyes would have been drawn to search it out or notice it by chance.

After that, it was just time for the finishing touches – repainted coin door, new t-molding, new casters, and the pretty stuff:

new marquee:

New Control Panel Overlay (prep work):

New Old Stock Joystick (I actually ended up opting for a black shafted one):

And some NOS Control Panel Stickers (I had these repro’d for posterity):

I installed the NOS wiring harness and the never-used printed circuit board. However, my biggest indulgence was installing a now-discontinued brand new HAPP monitor that I bought 2 years prior just waiting for the right project to put it in.  What happens when you put all that together, you ask?

I feel that all of my hard work paid off. I do think that this game will always have a home in my arcade due the personal nature of this project. I would like to thank Jeff Rothe for his help with the stickers and Brian Jones at gamestencils.com for his help with printing the stickers and cutting the vinyl sideart. Brian even went so far as to include a custom Gunsmoke keychain that uses my sideart as the design.  Both the stencil set and the control panel stickers are available for purchase from Gamestencils.com.

I feel that there are plenty of other good-quality conversion kit games that deserve the same treatment. I know that I’d love to see a “dedicated” 1942, and that the sideart for Ghosts and Goblins could be redone much cooler, so those are two projects I’m working on right now. What custom side art would you like to see next?